The Evolution of Transportation : With the ...

The Evolution of Transportation :
With the invention of the automobile and airplane
Melinda Erwin
History 202-03
Mr. Schaffer
April 21, 2009
The evolution of transportation in the areas of automobiles and airplanes has had a major impact on people, cargo, and the economy. It has greatly impacted the lives of people by allowing them to move out of big cities and into the suburbs. People have a greater since of freedom to come and go as they please instead of being confined to one place. With the use of automobiles and planes, goods are able to arrive at their destination easier and faster from the point of manufacturing to the point of consumption, such as grocery stores. Today the automobile industry such as Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors is having a negative impact on our economy. The automobile industry has historically been one of the driving forces in the economy of the United States. There are about two-hundred and fifty million cars on the roads in the United States.
History of Automobiles and Airplanes
Since the beginning of the 1800’s, horses were the basic form of transportation, other than by foot. People used horses for many kinds of transportation and farming. Horses were used to haul wagons and buggies in order to transport people and goods from one destination to another. They were also used to plow fields and transport farm equipment by farmers. The roads that the horse and buggy traveled on was made of dirt and gravel. The roads were manageable for them because the way they were designed allowed them to travel across rivers and open fields. It was not until the invention of the automobile that people started to veer away from the horse and buggy and started buying a more dependable form of transportation.
In 1893, Charles and Frank Duryea made the first automobile in the United States. Charles and Frank Duryea took ideas from the Benz’s automobile model and made a better one. The automobile had a one cylinder engine and could go a speed of eight miles per hour. In 1895, soon after the first automobile was made in the United States; an amateur inventor named Hiram Maxim developed an experimental working gasoline engine. Maxim’s idea was noticed by Albert Pope. He was the owner of the Pope Bicycle Company and wanted to mass produce automobiles. Pope thought people would be afraid to ride in a car with the gasoline engine because of the risk it could explode. In response to this, five-hundred electric cars and about forty gasoline cars were produced by the Pope Bicycle Company. About three hundred companies were experimenting with automobiles by the end of the Eighteenth Century.
In 1901, the Curved Dash Oldsmobile was the first to be mass produced in America by Ransome Eli Olds, who introduced the concept of the assembly line. However; it was Henry Ford who was credited for the assembly line. Ford improved Ransome Olds’ concept of the assembly line by ...